Quiet and unassuming, the Indian business baron drives himself to work in an unremarkable Tata sedan. His beachfront bachelor pad is found in the hippest tip of south Mumbai, but Ratan has only CDs, books and his dogs for company. He does not drink or smoke. His vices revolve around speed.
The commercial and wholesale banking arena differs from conventional retail banking, given the complexity and sophistication of business banking products and offerings in this highly specialised market segment. Oscar Grobler, of Absa Corporate Business Bank, says banks have struggled to define how they should segment their business banking offering.
Schools ranked "the poorest of the poor" will be bolstered by an increase in support staff to free teachers from administrative duties so that they can spend more time on teaching and delivering quality Âeducation. The government has allocated just less than R1-billion that will provide for an extra 14 000 support staff posts.
One of the world’s most distinguished physicists has scrutinised some science-fiction concepts, such as teleportation and forcefields, and is convinced that they can become reality. Professor Michio Kaku, of City University in New York, believes invisibility cloaks and teleÂpathy could be possible this century.
While Africa is experiencing an exodus of academics to overseas universities, are foreigners willing to work in the region? Dr Jon Harris of Executive Partners says often academics are employed on a three- to five-year contract, which may or may not be renewable, and thus are perhaps more willing than others to "give Africa a try".
State secrecy is an important issue in a democracy, especially given our past, but is the draft Protection of Information Bill the answer? Its stated aim is to ”promote the free flow of information within an open and democratic society without compromising the security of the Republic”.
Arab human rights activists have condemned a Saudi religious edict calling for the execution of two writers for apostasy — giving a rare glimpse of tensions over Islam inside the conservative kingdom. King Abdullah recently called for the first time for a dialogue among Muslims, Christians and Jews, after discussing the idea with Pope Benedict XVI.
The Casa Poporului is the unfinished work of one of Europe’s last megalomaniacs, Nicolae Ceausescu. Much of historic Bucharest was levelled to create a building that the Romanian dictator could boast of as the largest in the world. An odd choice of summit venue for Nato, which tries to define itself as much by shared democratic values as it does by brute force.
The municipality of the surfing village of Port St Johns on the Wild Coast has been accused of engineering community divisions and rushing to settle a land claim to bail itself out of bankruptcy. Land Affairs Minister Lulu Xingwana has signed off a R92,7-million compensation settlement.
”In a bid to help me trace my ancestry, my father took me to the Free State town of Qwa-Qwa on the Lesotho border. It was part of the process of welcoming me into his family. It began about a week earlier at sunset on a Friday. My old man spilled the blood of a few beasts and performed several rituals to appease his ancestors.”